A TelecomDrive.com Spotlight on Digital Transformation
Whether it is a Communications Service Provider or an enterprise customer – a transformational digital embrace is needed to fuel future growth and swiftly move business where the action is.
Keeping this in mind, powered by GENBAND – Kandy a cloud based, real-time communications software development platform is positioning its innovations to drive telecoms and enterprise customers towards accelerated time to market proposition.
Sacha Gera, SVP Cloud Products, Kandy interacts with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about why telecoms and enterprise communities need to fast, adopt digitization and better compete in the market.
How do you as an organisation – look at emerging opportunities in digital transformation?
We’ve oriented our entire business to leverage digital transformation opportunities. Our real-time communications expertise has given us tremendous insight, capabilities and intellectual property (more than 450 patents) with which we empower our customers as they take advantage of this new environment.
Just over two years ago, we launched Kandy, our cloud-based communications Platform as a Service (cPaaS) to further support this massive shift in the way we communicate, collaborate, do business and live our lives.
When it comes to digital transformation – there are operators as well as enterprise customers that are looking for such enablement. What is your go to market strategy for these market segments?
Operators are being forced to identify innovative ways to offset traditional revenues. We offer a range of services that leverage their intrinsic assets to compete with new entrants who are riding the operators’ massive infrastructure investments without putting any skin in the game. Offerings like SIP Trunking as a Service (STaaS) and Consumer OTT allow operators to reduce their costs, expand their global reach, expedite time to market, and deliver a superior customer experience.
Simultaneously, enterprises across the globe are adapting to how their customers and employees expect to communicate. The speed of business has increased and it’s critical to have the tools that seamlessly enable connection and collaboration. In addition to robust cloud UC and multi-channel cloud contact center services we offer Kandy Wrappers (more below) and communications APIs that seamlessly embed voice, video, IM, presence, text, collaboration and more into business processes and applications for comprehensive communications capabilities. All of our offerings are designed to expedite service creation and delivery and accelerate return on investment.
How big do you think would be this opportunity on global scale?
It’s massive no matter how you measure it: industry analyst Gartner states that the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 18 percent in 2017 to total $246.8 billion, up from $209.2 billion in 2016. The highest growth will come from cloud system infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is projected to grow 36.8 percent in 2017 to reach $34.6 billion, while cloud application services or software as a service (SaaS) is expected to grow 20.1 percent to reach $46.3 billion.
Where are the big opportunities for growth and what are the key geographies for you as an organisation?
The internet knows no (or few) boundaries and digital transformation is a global imperative. The U.S. and Canadian Carrier market is somewhat lagging in adoption of cloud technologies and is clearly a massive opportunity for providers with the right combination of products, vision and execution capabilities.
Product-wise some of the biggest growth opportunities we see are:
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), which help businesses facilitate communication and collaboration are now widely adopted but still have a way to go when it comes to delivering a truly seamless experience. We expect the next big thing to be container technologies that fluidly mash up disparate applications and business processes within a single desktop/mobile client “shell”.
The idea is to enable Service Providers and Independent Software Vendors with the ability to own the customer experience on both desktop and mobile; gone are the days of competing on backend features and pipes, today it’s all about the user experience. For example, imagine the convenience and ease of use of mashing up a Microsoft Skype for Business experience for instant messaging, address book and presence with a voice and video delivered through the service provider’s HD quality service. This is what truly unified communications can look like.
It’s well known that messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Line, etc.) are now growing faster than social networks. We are all – not just Millennials — increasingly used to messaging with friends and family of course, but with brands too. Chat bots are becoming more sophisticated thanks to the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities that enable them to become more useful, and there is clearly a huge growth curve ahead of us. There is a tremendous business case in the contact center especially to automate interactions while driving customer satisfaction and cost efficiencies.
Finally IoT is still nascent and connecting things and humans to make interactions more intuitive, pleasant, useful and efficient is also a massive opportunity.
What according to you are the biggest benefits that digital transformation promises to bring for operators and enterprise customers?
The digital revolution has enabled a real paradigm shift, from focusing on product sets to enabling outcomes in real time. Today’s rich platforms are making this new way of doing business possible. A UCaaS/CPaaS like our Kandy is an enabling technology for service development and provision. It helps service providers differentiate themselves and enterprises do business better.
With today’s software platforms you achieve economies of scale quickly. You can embed communications APIs into existing business applications and significantly enhance your capabilities in hours and days vs. months and years, whether by offering Two Factor Authentication (2FA) in your product download, enhancing your website with a chat bot or integrating AI to your storefront.
What are your innovations that can drive digital transformation? How cost effective are these solutions?
We offer a number of solutions but one in particular is our Kandy Wrappers, revenue-ready, pre-packaged, fully functional software applications that can be delivered standalone or inserted into a website or application to endow it with embedded real time communications capabilities in minutes.
Kandy wrappers allow Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and businesses to reduce their time to market by significantly reducing their implementation effort and costs. Wrappers include Business Phone, Live Support, Truck Roll, Secure Two Factor Authentication (2FA) and Visual Attendant, all of which support a better customer experience and enriched capabilities, quickly and easily.
How do you think telecoms and enterprise can future proof their networks and customer loyalties with the help of right digital transformational strategies?
CSPs must deliver increasing value to their users, which they can do by leveraging their tremendous physical assets into the virtual world. It starts by transitioning to an all-IP environment for service agility and business and operational effectiveness. Then they can bolt on to a cloud communications platform to deliver new services and own the desktop and mobile experience.
Enterprises have different trigger events that push them to embrace the digital transition. Employee growth, relocation, a lack of advanced solutions in their current product set or CAPEX constraints can all be reasons to move to the cloud. Once there, the results usually speak for themselves: new embedded capabilities help enhance productivity in a natural and useful way that employees, who already communicate similarly in their private lives, naturally gravitate to. There is little to no learning curve but big rewards.
